Have you ever wondered what Jesus actually looked like? We don’t have a description of his physical appearance in the Gospels. And yet, people across the world instantly recognize his face.

The long hair. The short beard with a moustache. The narrow, stately face. Historians have found these features of Jesus depicted in paintings, icons, mosaics, and even ancient coins dating to the seventh century.

They resemble the face of Jesus we know today. But how did this depiction become so universal?

The earliest depictions of Jesus resembled Greek or Roman gods – clean-shaven young men dressed in togas. Representations were often symbolic because of Christian persecution. After Christianity was legalized by the emperor Constantine in 313, visual depictions of Jesus spread rapidly. One of the oldest is the image of Christ Pantocrator, preserved at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai.

In 1930, a French scholar named Paul Vignon compared these ancient depictions of Jesus. He identified a set of fine details that almost always appear—details like: a square-cornered U shape between the eyebrows, an asymmetry in the cheeks, and even a subtle gap in the beard below the lower lip. Modern image analysis confirms these similarities are not a coincidence. There must have been a common source that all these images were based on.

Could it be that the face we associate with Jesus—the face depicted in centuries of Christian art—came from the Shroud of Turin?